


Grounded

by Siria



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-25
Updated: 2011-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:48:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I suppose I'd just forgotten what it was like to be... well, treated as a princess."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grounded

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celli/gifts).



The castle's chief seamstress is a small, angular woman who has an interest in seams that borders on the obsessive, and an absolute disregard for whether or not the pins she wields prick Snow as she works. Dress fittings are both exhaustive and exhausting in a way Snow had almost forgotten during the years she spent hunting in the woods. There's an honest sort of tiredness that comes from dishonest work—from ambushing one of the Queen's convoys heading from one market town to the next, or relieving some elves of a golden trinket or two. When the seamstress releases Snow with a mumbled command to return the next morning for the fitting of the rest of her trousseau, Snow's body still feels active but her mind is oddly sluggish and disconnected, as if she's not slept for days.

She walks through corridors full of bustle and industry, and it's still strange, to be surrounded by so many people after the forest's solitude. Housemaids running to and fro with mounds of starched linens bob curtsies to her; cooks engage in heated arguments about the appropriate kinds of frosting; kitchen boys scamper past her on errands. Though it's all focused energy, it's enough to make her head ache, and Snow makes for the library's quiet. She's unsurprised to find James there, sitting in one of the window seats with his long legs stretched out in front of him, puzzling over some correspondence. He looks up when he hears the door close behind her, and the smile on his face is broad and brilliant enough that Snow feels her skin prickle with a heat to which she's still unaccustomed. Before James, it had been a long time since someone had smiled at her without intent to deceive.

"How was your morning?" he asks, shifting to make room for her as she sits down beside him.

"Madame Edith is convinced that I'm her personal pin cushion." Snow rolls her eyes as she speaks, but smiles to let him know it's not so serious as all that. "But she's assured me that her dress will both be finished on time _and_ a marvel."

"Well," James says dryly, "we couldn't have you walk down the aisle in anything less than a spectacle." His kiss is gentle, sweet and welcome, but when he pulls away, Snow sees a frown creasing his forehead. "What's wrong?"

"I—nothing," she says, but when the look on his face doesn't grow any less sceptical, she sighs. "I suppose I'd just forgotten what it was like to be... well, treated as a princess."

"You're unhappy," he says, and the line between his brows grows deeper.

"Not with you, Charming," Snow says, and leans a little more heavily against his knee to emphasise the point. " _You_ think of me as Snow, but everyone else here calls me _Highness_ , as if the past two years were just some bad dream that can now safely be forgotten. Calling attention to the fact that the princess once turned vagabond would be _impolite_ , and..." Her words trail off, because it's hard to find a way to convey the frustration she feels, the sense that the Snow White to whom these people bow and bob is not the same Snow White as her; that for etiquette's sake they will gladly pretend all most hardly fought battles never occurred; that she hardly knows if she fits inside her own skin anymore.

James leans in to her and takes her two hands in his. He turns them over, traces his fingertips over her lifelines, over the white scar that shivers along her right palm. "Tell me how you got this one," he says.

"Fighting an erl-king," she says, confused both by the change in topic and by the fact that he knows this tale.

"And this one?" The length of her right forearm, a faint, faded pebble-dashing of scar tissue that can be better read by touch than by sight.

"Robbing the northern stagecoach a twelvemonth ago; the rope broke and I fell against some rocks. James—"

"And these?" His thumbs rub against the roughened, callused skin of her fingers, all the places where the attempt to master bow and sword and rope snares have made themselves most known.

"You are a very baffling man," she tells him.

"And _you_ are the same woman I fell in love with," James says, clasping her hands in his. The rough skin of his own hands catches against hers, makes her shiver in a new and unexpected way. "Snow, I know you. I'll always know you. Your past can't be erased by a name, any more than mine could be—some things go deeper than that."

"Sentimentalist," she says, to distract from the heat that rushes to her cheeks.

"Outlaw," he says fondly. This time when he kisses her, Snow feels it in every sinew and muscle and fibre of her being; cups his cheek in the palm of her hand and lets the catch of her calluses against the fine grain of James' stubble keep her grounded.


End file.
